This invention relates to a system and method for managing automatic broadcasting of information derived from on-line analytical processing system reports to subscriber devices, including electronic mail, personal digital assistants, pagers, facsimiles, printers, mobile phones, and telephones, based on subscriber-specified criteria.
The ability to act quickly and decisively in today""s increasingly competitive marketplace is critical to the success of any organization. The volume of data that is available to organizations is rapidly increasing and frequently overwhelming. The availability of large volumes of data presents various challenges. One challenge is to avoid inundating an individual with unnecessary information. Another challenge is to ensure all relevant information is available in a timely manner.
One known approach to addressing these and other challenges is known as data warehousing. Data warehouses, relational databases, and data marts are becoming important elements of many information delivery systems because they provide a central location where a reconciled version of data extracted from a wide variety of operational systems may be stored. As used herein, a data warehouse should be understood to be an informational database that stores shareable data from one or more operational databases of record, such as one or more transaction-based database systems. A data warehouse typically allows users to tap into a business""s vast store of operational data to track and respond to business trends that facilitate forecasting and planning efforts. A data mart may be considered to be a type of data warehouse that focuses on a particular business segment.
Decision support systems have been developed to efficiently retrieve selected information from data warehouses. One type of decision support system is known as an on-line analytical processing system (xe2x80x9cOLAPxe2x80x9d). In general, OLAP systems analyze the data from a number of different perspectives and support complex analyses against large input data sets.
There are at least three different types of OLAP architecturesxe2x80x94ROLAP, MOLAP, and HOLAP. ROLAP (xe2x80x9cRelational On-Line Analytical Processingxe2x80x9d) systems are systems that use a dynamic server connected to a relational database system. Multidimensional OLAP (xe2x80x9cMOLAPxe2x80x9d) utilizes a proprietary multidimensional database (xe2x80x9cMDDBxe2x80x9d) to provide OLAP analyses. The main premise of this architecture is that data must be stored multidimensionally to be viewed multidimensionally. A HOLAP (xe2x80x9cHybrid On-Line Analytical Processingxe2x80x9d) system is a hybrid of these two.
ROLAP is a three-tier, client/server architecture comprising a presentation tier, an application logic tier and a relational database tier. The relational database tier stores data and connects to the application logic tier. The application logic tier comprises a ROLAP engine that executes multidimensional reports from multiple end users. The ROLAP engine integrates with a variety of presentation layers, through which users perform OLAP analyses. The presentation layers enable users to provide requests to the ROLAP engine. The premise of ROLAP is that OLAP capabilities are best provided directly against a relational database, e.g., the data warehouse.
In a ROLAP system, data from transaction-processing systems is loaded into a defined data model in the data warehouse. Database routines are run to aggregate the data, if required by the data model. Indices are then created to optimize query access times. End users submit multidimensional analyses to the ROLAP engine, which then dynamically transforms the requests into SQL execution plans. The SQL is submitted to the relational database for processing, the relational query results are cross-tabulated, and a multidimensional result set is returned to the end user. ROLAP is a fully dynamic architecture capable of utilizing pre-calculated results when they are available, or dynamically generating results from atomic information when necessary.
The ROLAP architecture directly accesses data from data warehouses, and therefore supports optimization techniques to meet batch window requirements and to provide fast response times. These optimization techniques typically include application-level table partitioning, aggregate inferencing, denormalization support, and multiple fact table joins.
MOLAP is a two-tier, client/server architecture. In this architecture, the MDDB serves as both the database layer and the application logic layer. In the database layer, the MDDB system is responsible for all data storage, access, and retrieval processes. In the application logic layer, the MDDB is responsible for the execution of all OLAP requests. The presentation layer integrates with the application logic layer and provides an interface through which the end users view and request OLAP analyses. The client/server architecture allows multiple users to access the multidimensional database.
Information from a variety of transaction-processing systems is loaded into the MDDB System through a series of batch routines. Once this atomic data has been loaded into the MDDB, the general approach is to perform a series of batch calculations to aggregate along the orthogonal dimensions and fill the MDDB array structures. For example, revenue figures for all of the stores in a state would be added together to fill the state level cells in the database. After the array structure in the database has been filled, indices are created and hashing algorithms are used to improve query access times.
Once this compilation process has been completed, the MDDB is ready for use. Users request OLAP reports through the presentation layer, and the application logic layer of the MDDB retrieves the stored data.
The MOLAP architecture is a compilation-intensive architecture. It principally reads the pre-compiled data, and has limited capabilities to dynamically create aggregations or to calculate business metrics that have not been pre-calculated and stored.
The hybrid OLAP (xe2x80x9cHOLAPxe2x80x9d) solution is a mix of MOLAP and relational architectures that support inquiries against summary and transaction data in an integrated fashion. The HOLAP approach enables a user to perform multidimensional analysis on data in the MDDB. However, if the user reaches the bottom of the multidimensional hierarchy and requires more detailed data, the HOLAP engine generates an SQL to retrieve the detailed data from the source relational database management system (xe2x80x9cRDBMSxe2x80x9d) and returns it to the end user. HOLAP implementations rely on simple SQL statements to pull large quantities of data into the mid-tier, multidimensional engine for processing. This constrains the range of inquiry and returns large, unrefined result sets that can overwhelm networks with limited bandwidth.
As described above, each of these types of OLAP systems are typically client-server systems. The OLAP engine resides on the server side and a module is typically provided at a client-side to enable users to input queries and report requests to the OLAP engine. Current client-side modules are typically stand alone software modules that are loaded on client-side computer systems. One drawback of such systems is that a user must learn how to operate the client-side software module in order to initiate queries and generate reports.
Although various user interfaces have been developed to enable users to access the content of data warehouses through server systems, many such systems experience significant drawbacks. All of these systems require that the user connect via a computer system to the server system to initiate reports and view the contents of the reports.
Moreover, current systems require that the user initiate a request for a report each time the user desires to have that report generated. A particular user may desire to run a to particular report frequently to determine the status of the report.
Further, reports may be extensive and may contain a large amount of information for a user to sort through each time a report is run. A particular user may only be interested in knowing if a particular value or set of values in the report has changed over a predetermined period of time. Current systems require the user to initiate the new report and then scan through the new report to determine if the information has changed over the time period specified.
These and other drawbacks exist with current OLAP interface systems.
An object of the invention is to overcome these and other drawbacks in existing systems.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a system that manages and controls the automatic broadcast of messages to subscribers based on criteria established by the subscriber when those criteria are determined to be satisfied by an on-line analytical processing system.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a subscriber-based system for automatic broadcast of OLAP reports that enables a system administrator to monitor performance and output of the system.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a subscriber-based system for automatic broadcast of OLAP reports that enables a system administrator to view subscribers to various services of the system.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a subscriber-based system for automatic broadcast of OLAP reports that enables a system administrator to manage the scheduling of services to output reports.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a subscriber-based system for automatic broadcast of OLAP reports that stores an address book for subscribers of the system and enables a system administrator to modify and maintain the address book.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a subscriber-based system for automatic broadcast of OLAP reports that enables use of dynamic recipient lists that are rendered to determine who receives output from the system.
These and other objects are realized by a system and method according to the present invention as described below. Such a system and method comprises a broadcast module that connects to an on-line analytical processing (OLAP) system comprising a server system for accessing information in one or more data warehouses to perform report analysis. The broadcast module may enable the defining of a service. A xe2x80x9cservicexe2x80x9d as used herein should be understood to include one or more reports that are scheduled to be run against one or more data warehouses, relational databases, files in a directory, information from web or file transfer protocol sites, information provided by a custom module, by a server system. These services may be subscribed to by users or user devices to enable the broadcast module to determine who should receive the results of a service. The broadcast module enables the creation of a service, the scheduling of the service, subscription of users to the defined services, generation of reports for the service, formatting of outputs of the service and broadcasting of messages based on the output for the service, among other functions.
Also, an administrator module may be provided that manages automatic generation of output from the on-line analytical processing system. The administrator module manages the operation of the service processing system to increase throughput, increase speed, and improve the administrator control over the processing. The system may maintain dynamic recipient lists that are resolved by system. The system enables administrator control over processing by enabling administrators to view all services and all subscribers of the system, by maintaining an address book containing entries for subscribers of the service and enabling the administrator to view the contents of the address book, and by scheduling processing of services. The system also governs the volume of services being processed, the number of subscribers to a particular service, and the number of output devices to which a service may be broadcast.
According to one embodiment of the present invention, a system for automatically generating output from an on-line analytical processing system based on scheduled services specified by subscribers of the system is provided. The system processes scheduled services in an on-line analytical processing system with each service comprising at least one query to be performed by the on-line analytical processing system. The system then automatically forwards output from the services to one or more subscriber output devices specified for that service. The system may also provide management of the output devices. Users may define new services, including the schedule of the services and the type, such as alert services or scheduled services, and may also subscribe to the services provided by the system. If an alert service is processed, the system may forward output only when one or more alert criteria are satisfied. Subscribers may be specified by a dynamic recipient list that is resolved each time the service is processed to determine recipients of the service output. A dynamic recipient list may be, for example, a list that determines the recipients of a service based on dynamically resolved criteria. For example, a bank may generate a list every month that identifies customers who have an account balance greater than $100,000 and who have not made a transaction within the last three months. The output devices the system may forward output to may comprise electronic mailbox, facsimile, printer, mobile phone, telephone, pager, PDA or web pages.
According to another embodiment of the present invention, a system that enables subscribers to personalize services used for automatically generating output from an online analytical processing system is provided. In addition to enabling subscribers to specify the content and schedule of one or more services, the system enables subscribers to personalize various other parameters relating to the service. For example, subscribers may specify the format of service output, filters to be applied to the service, and a variety of other personalization options described in greater detail below.
According to another embodiment of the invention, the system utilizes static recipient lists (xe2x80x9cSRLxe2x80x9d) and dynamic recipient lists (xe2x80x9cDRLxe2x80x9d) for determining subscribers to a service. SRLs may be a list of manually entered subscriber names of a particular service. DRLs, however, may be a report generated by the system listing subscriber names that meet a predetermined criteria for a service. DRLs enable lists of subscribers to change according to certain criteria applied to contents of a database. For example, a DRL may be used to broadcast a sales report to only those subscribers who are managers of stores who have not met a predetermined sales goal.
Other objects and advantages of the present invention will be apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art upon reviewing the detailed description of the present invention.